32
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
SCION DEPT.
TARGET PRACTICE
L , in Trump
Tower, twenty floors up from the
Trump campaign headquarters, Don-
ald Trump, Jr., surveyed his desk, on
which sat a bronze statue of Theodore
Roosevelt, a rifle cradled in his arm
and a Cape-bu alo skull at his feet.
"He was a big hunter and started much
of the conservation movement in this
country, which is why we have as much
public land as we do," Trump, Jr., said,
adding that, as "a brash New Yorker,"
Roosevelt might seem "an unlikely ad-
vocate" for such things. "But he was all
about getting away from the city and
out into the woods." On a table lay a
camo cap bearing the words "
."
Trump, Jr., the thirty-eight-year-old
eldest son of the presumptive Repub-
lican candidate for President, and an
executive vice-president of the Trump
Organization, has been running the
family business while his father makes
a case for why he should run the coun-
try. He had spent Saturday night at the
White House Correspondents' Asso-
ciation dinner, catching a . . flight
home for an archery tournament. Al-
though he is more mild-mannered than
his father, he has a trace of the family
braggadocio. "I won both the traditional-
bow category and the compound-bow
category," he said.
He took the elevator down to Fifth
Avenue and headed to Central Park,
walking faster and talking more loudly
than everyone in his path. Trump, Sr.,
has been courting the votes of the na-
tion's nearly forty million sportsmen,
and Trump, Jr., a less bronzed but amply
gelled reflection of his father, often
serves as his proxy. The son has given
interviews to Bowhunter and Deer &
Deer Hunting, and frequently appears
in full camo. He and his brother Eric
shot pheasants in Iowa and talked with
reporters while wearing neon-orange
vests, shotguns slung over their shoul-
ders. In , photographs of the broth-
ers posing with animals they'd killed
in Zimbabwe caused a stir, particu-
larly one in which Trump, Jr., held a
severed elephant tail in one hand and
a knife in the other. ( referred to
the killings as "two young millionaires'
grisly photo opportunity.")
Trump, Jr., owns "dozens" of fire-
arms, which he keeps "in a gun safe or
two." For shooting waterfowl, he uses
a Benelli Super Black Eagle II, a util-
itarian twelve-gauge shotgun; when
hunting big game or shooting com-
petitively, he favors a modified Rem-
ington Model rifle, or an AR-
platform semiautomatic rifle. He con-
siders proposed measures to curb the
easy availability of weapons like the
AR to be un-American. "If someone
wants to commit mass homicide, that
person is going to do it whether he
drives a car into a crowd or builds a
bomb," he said.
Like his father, he breaks with Re-
publican orthodoxy when he feels like
it. Trump, Jr., is a defender of keeping
public land public, a contentious issue
among sportsmen. "I'm in the fortu-
nate position to be able to buy some
land on my own, but not everyone has
that ability," he said. Near the zoo, he
bought a Diet Coke from a hot-dog
vender. "As it stands, if the states get
the lands back, they could remain pub-
lic or they could be sold o . So, say
you have a ten-thousand-acre area.
Well, a state could turn that into fifty
golf courses that would be private and
exclusive."
Trump, Jr.,'s a nity for the out-
doors comes from his mother, Ivana's,
contempt for, their fellow-Americans who are white and
sinking. Abstract sympathy with the working class as an
economic entity is easy, but the feeling can vanish on con-
tact with actual members of the group, who often arrive with
disturbing beliefs and powerful resentments---who might
not sound or look like people urban progressives want to
know. White male privilege remains alive in America, but
the phrase would seem odd, if not infuriating, to a sixty-
year-old man working as a Walmart greeter in southern
Ohio. The growing strain of identity politics on the left is
pushing working-class whites, chastised for various types of
bigotry (and sometimes justifiably), all the more decisively
toward Trump.
Last fall, two Princeton economists released a study show-
ing that, since the turn of the century, middle-aged white
Americans---primarily less educated ones---have been dying
at ever-increasing rates. This is true of no other age or eth-
nic group in the United States. The main factors are alco-
hol, opioids, and suicide---an epidemic of despair. A subse-
quent Washington Post story showed that the crisis is
particularly severe among middle-aged white women in
rural areas. In twenty-one counties across the South and the
Midwest, mortality rates among these women have actually
doubled since the turn of the century. Anne Case, one of the
Princeton study's co-authors, said, "They may be privileged
by the color of their skin, but that is the only way in their
lives they've ever been privileged."
According to the Post, these regions of white working-
class pain tend to be areas where Trump enjoys strong sup-
port. These Americans know that they're being left behind,
by the economy and by the culture. They sense the indi er-
ence or disdain of the winners on the prosperous coasts and
in the innovative cities, and it is reciprocated. Trump has
seized the Republican nomination by finding scapegoats for
the economic hardships and disintegrating lives of work-
ing-class whites, while giving these voters a reassuring but
false promise of their restoration to the center of American
life. He plays to their sense of entitlement, but his hollow-
ness will ultimately deepen their cynicism.
The Democrats probably won't need the votes of the
white working class to win this year. Demographic trends
favor the Party, as does the bloated and hateful persona of
the Republican choice. Nonetheless, the Democratic nom-
inee can't a ord, either politically or morally, to write o
those Americans. They need a politics that o ers honest
answers to their legitimate grievances and keeps them from
sliding further into self-destruction.
---George Packer